How to Assess Product Content Program Maturity?
At ICP, we recognize that product content strategy is a journey; it is complicated, as no two businesses are the same. The nuances of your structure, your technology, and your products will mean no one size fits all.
Pain Points Right at the Start
Disjointed Systems: Teams are likely managing product information across multiple spreadsheets, databases, and systems. Not only can this lead to inconsistencies, redundancies and gaps in both process and content, it also results in manual data entry which is slow and error-prone, and there will often be a lack of visibility on data quality, compliance or performance completeness.
Legacy Systems and Practices: It is often found that unfit-for-use legacy systems and practices are in place. Continuing with inefficient, siloed systems and, perhaps, lack of integrations between them can also hinder the flow and process of getting information, assets and, ultimately, your product to where it is sold. Internally, managing product data across multiple teams without a PIM leads to coordination issues, duplication of workload and inconsistent product information. These bad practices cost your organisation money year-on-year due to siloed investments, fines from retailers and/or distributors, lack of market share and poor ROI on technology and resources.
Poor Customer Experience: Customers expect to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, regardless of where they’re searching, and when presented with inconsistent or inaccurate information there becomes a lack of trust, negatively impacting returns, sales, reputation and market share. When selling internationally, that customer experience relies even more on accurate, localised product information.
Slow to Time-to-Market: Bringing new products to market quickly is crucial in a competitive environment. Manual processes and disjointed systems can slow down product launch processes, affecting your ability to respond to market demands. Furthermore, the financial risk on the business can show up in the form of compliance files and a higher return rate. As your product portfolio and assortments grow, this problem will only become more apparent.
Our PIM / PXM maturity assessment tool helps you understand where you are in this journey and provides recommendations to propel you toward excellence. We outline clear technical and operational steps to meet your growth goals, solve current pain points, and enhance business efficiencies
There are three main areas that you need to focus on in order to grow out your product content strategy/program; People, Technology and Process. All three go hand in hand and are equally dependent on each other to build success.
Why does the output of this assessment help you?
In allowing you to identify Strengths and Weaknesses it becomes easier to pinpoint areas of improvement leading to targeted strategies with expected quantifiable business outcomes. Optimizing resources and investment, as well as aligning teams to a clearer-defined process can yield better efficiencies overall. Providing enhanced training and enablement should result in increasing employee satisfaction at work as they have more clarity over their role and responsibility surrounding product content with measurable objectives that drive outcomes. Our maturity assessment can help you understand how to start creating cross-functional collaboration and unity across your ecommerce, sales, marketing, data teams, regulatory, and IT teams.
Evaluating maturity encourages a data-driven approach, fostering better decision-making based on analytics and insights, and allows you to build business cases that resonate with senior leadership to continue to gain stakeholder buy-in and investment for your product content program.
In essence, regular assessments provide a roadmap across People, Process and Technology for continuous improvement and strategic alignment, crucial for maintaining a strong product experience in a dynamic market. Regularly assessing the effectiveness of PIM/PXM initiatives, learn from successes and failures, and be willing to pivot strategies as needed.
Based on answers to questions across each section - People, Process and Technology - our assessment will provide you an overall maturity level rating of Aware, Developing, Practicing, Optimizing, or Leading. In the following pages, we'll explore each maturity level and actionable strategies to level up your program.
